Mistress of Rome

Mistress of Rome
By Kate Quinn

Thea, a captive from Judaea, is a clever and determined survivor hiding behind a slave’s docile mask. Purchased as a toy for the spoiled heiress Lepida Pollia, Thea evades her mistress’s spite and hones a secret passion for music. But when Thea wins the love of Rome’s newest and most savage gladiator and dares to dream of a better life, the jealous Lepida tears the lovers apart and casts Thea out.

Rome offers many ways for the resourceful to survive, and Thea remakes herself as a singer for the Eternal ’City’s glittering aristocrats. As she struggles for success and independence, her nightingale voice attracts a dangerous new admirer: the Emperor himself. But the passions of an all-powerful man come with a heavy price, and Thea finds herself fighting for both her soul and her destiny.

Many have tried to destroy the Emperor: a vengeful gladiator, an upright senator, a tormented soldier, a Vestal Virgin. But in the end, the life of Rome’s most powerful man lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress.

Ah, Mistress of Rome: A Series of Unfortunate Events.  It sounds weird coming from someone who just read The Feast of the Goat, but long stretches of Mistress of Rome feel like torture porn. Or tragedy porn or whatever the name is for it when the characters go through one miserable obstacle only to find themselves in front of another, higher, one. Over and over and over.

Part of that comes from two of the worst villains to grace the pages of historical fiction : Lepida Pollida, spoiled senator's daughter who is sex and power mad, and who kicks off her career by separating our lovers and selling Thea to a dockhouse brothel and then later upping the ante by seducing her husband's son and being mean to her epileptic daughter, and Domitian, the emperor, who is introduced as a potential rescuer of Thea only to turn out to be a torturer and abuser of women and slaves, including his own niece, Julia. Domitian, obviously, was a real person, and I sure hope he was as bad as all that because otherwise Quinn has sadly maligned his character here.

Quinn's writing, is, as usual, exemplary, breathless and urgent as she takes us back thousands of years to the Roman Empire. Having just read her most recently based, Briar Club, you can tell that Quinn revels in the historical details available from whatever period she's writing in. Here, being so much more in the distant past, she's not able to bring as much of that in, but there's still a wealth of ground to cover, as the book takes us from 82 ad to 96 ad.

The early sections skip great chunks of years at a time, and those are some of the harder ones to get through- our heroes just keep getting kicked when they're down, and much of the activity is just place setting for the final confrontations that take place in 95-96. By the time our heroes emerge triumphant over the villains, I was mostly just tired and wanted it over with.

Quinn's talent shines when you consider that the whole book hinges on the relationship of a couple who have a few months together fourteen years before most of the action takes place - and the couple is separated most of that time.  We have to both believe in the relationship and care about it, and Quinn manages to do that, for me at least, although Vix, the erstwhile scamp born to Thea, mostly bugs instead of endears. He becomes a primary character later in the series, which doesn't tempt me to read them.

There's a supernatural thread running through the book as well: a soothsayer who is eerily accurate, some characters who escape certain death because of the implied favor of the gods, the mysterious healing powers of gladiator blood. It lets us suspend disbelief on some of the more unlikely plot points Quinn inserts (a gladiator who only loses ONCE in eight years?? somehow everyone keeps winding up at the same places together??).

It's odd to me, that although this and The Feast of the Goat both concern fictionalized re-tellings of famously assassinated dictators (and include invented women characters who were abused by them) they feel very different. Quinn's books are comfortable reads because although some characters do get sacrificed (I won't forget you, Hercules!) she tends to leave readers on a optimistic note: Domitian's death ushered - in real life - almost ninety years of Roman prosperity.  Our core couple, reunited at last, retires to the country. Marcus, the poor beleaguered husband, gets a new wife who likes him. Whereas in The Feast of the Goat, the assassination brings not relief but torture. Thirty years on, citizens have forgotten the horrors of the regime, and reminisce for better days. Quinn doesn't trade in that kind of punchline. But the cynic in me sometimes wishes she would.

06: A Book That Fills Your Favorite Prompt From The 2015 PS Reading Challenge [13: Set In Another Country]

Ten Second Reviews

The Devil in Music

By Kate Ross

Alas, we've come to the end of our series, and I am actually very disappointed that there won't be any more - this was a pleasant delight of a set.  As before, coincidences and lucky chances abound without alluding to them, and it's a very chunky book, but you just don't seem to mind any of that.  I may at some point get the whole set to sit down and enjoy.  I really couldn't say that these are the best books in the world, but I just really had a good time with them, and in the end, isn't that what matters?  Anyway, Julian Kestrel solves another (couple) murders, this time whilst on Lake Como, which did nothing to make me satisfied with my own little plot of land.  Truly the rich are to be envied.

My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories

Edited by Stephanie Perkins

This was more of a hit or miss for me (which most anthologies are, despite my glowing review of How Long Til Black Future Month? and the, uh, next anthology, below).  It's definitely a YA & love/romance-y one, particularly at the start, which I guess I... wasn't expecting?  Now that I think about it, I think I just picked this one up in the library and didn't really look at reviews or anything, so... surprise! Here's my one sentence reviews:

• Midnights, by Rainbow Rowell: boring, nineteen year olds like each other after several years of being friends.  
• The Lady and the Fox, by Kelly Link: girl falls in love with weird guy she only sees at Christmas if it's snowing.  He's from like, three hundred years ago, so who knows how that culture shock is going to go but let's pretend they have a future together.
• Angels in the Snow, by Matt de la Pena: hispanic guy falls for white girl while he's housesitting at some rich person's place - not bad, but after the previous two, needed something stronger than this.
• Polaris is Where You'll Find Me, by Jenny Han: Um, what the heck did I just read? Young human girl raised up by Santa falls for an elf, but also has a thing where she tells lies about meeting a Scandinavian boy and also really wants to leave the North Pole. This feels like it ends on a cliffhanger, but it's crazy enough that I was starting to get into it.
• It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown: Ah, here we run into our series second theme: depressed people.  It kinda came up with Angels in the Snow, and in this one, a young christmas tree salesman is picked up by, and rearranges the furniture for, a young lady whose father left her and her mother because they were his bigamist family.  Fun at the outset but a little too saccharine to finish.
• Your Temporary Santa, by David Levithan: another one about a depressed family, although I wasn't quite clear on what fatherly disaster had befallen this one - another abandonment I guess.  This was fine, less romance because the couple was already together, so it was just someone doing something nice, which is more of what I was looking for in this set.
• Krampuslauf, by Holly Black: trailer park girl invites a demon back to a party, and he turns a cheating boyfriend into a donkey.  Good times! Two thumbs up.
• What the Hell Have You Done, Sophie Roth? by Gayle Forman: lonely city girl gets picked up by black guy on her small town midwest college campus.  I think I gave this one more of a pass because the stories before were a bit better/different.  If this had been placed third or fourth in the book, whoa.
• Beer Buckets and Baby Jesus, by Myra McEntire: Juvenile delinquent and good girl fall for each other during mixed up Christmas Pageant process.  At least this was a little bit funnier than the other boy-meets-girl stories, but also more of the same.
• Welcome to Christmas, CA, by Kiersten White: young teen hates everyone in her small town, until she meets the new diner cook who knows what food everyone needs. I definitely thought that the cook was going to turn out to be like, an elf, or an angel, or some other supernatural being, but he was just another juvenile delinquent, but this one was my favorite by far, especially when she learns that her mother and de facto step-father have actually been scrimping and saving for her and her college fund (so obvious, but it's CHRISTMAS).  Sniff.
•  Star of Bethlehem, by Ally Carter: Young singing sensation switches places with Icelandic girl and flies to Oklahoma where she feels okay about singing Christmas Carols again. This one felt way too long, and I can't help but HATE the very end, where the local judge is telling people that apparently it would be pretty easy to undo the guardianship her manager has over her.  In favor of these people she met a week ago, I guess.  Mmmmhmmm, yeah. 
• The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer, by Laini Taylor: The Strange the Dreamer series has been on my list forever (I think I was waiting to see if more books in the series were coming out???) and this gave me the push to get it. I didn't want to read too closely in case there were spoilers for the book series, but the beginning is really interesting and well written, and it inspired me to check more books by her out, so what else do you want?

Nine Witch Tales

By Abby Kedabra

Man, I LOVED this book when I was growing up, some twenty-five years ago, so I bought an old copy online, and it does NOT disappoint, this book is wild. I really mostly remembered the first story, where the twelve horned witches come in to do some sewing and then send this woman on errands like, "fill up a bucket using this sieve".  But all of them are fun, and short enough you don't get tired of them: haha, the one about Kowashi's mother, who developed an appetite for eating fish, bones and all, and he whacks her on the head and realizes she's a witch demon cat, and then! Casually, at the very end it goes: "Not long after this, Kowashi discovered that the wicked cat had killed his real mother and buried her in the garden." And then it just ends. FIN.  MAJESTIC.  I LOVE IT. And the curious woman who uses the magical ointment and is dragged all over and then wakes up in a barn and gets fired because her employer thinks she's drunk, lol. There's comeuppances and escapes, and each story is a delightfully spooky and scary-but-not-too-scary tale.

 

Bitter Greens

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens...

After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition.

Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does.

There are a lot of shitty men in this book.  Don't get me wrong, some of the women are cruel, too.  But about two thirds of the way through the book, I was just like, over men.  In particular, Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King, who sounds like a real ass. And let's not forget the Italian man who lined up thirty-nine men to rape Selena's mother.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bitter Greens is told in three tales: in the French court of the late 1600s, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, the real author behind our most familiar Rapunzel tale, Margherita, an Italian girl in the late 1580s, who is the basis for Rapunzel, and Selena Leonelli, born in the late 1400s, who becomes both the model for Titian and the witch to imprison our Rapunzel.   The book begins with Charlotte-Rose's incarceration at a convent (as opposed to exile in England, which was a fate worse than death, apparently) and frames the Margherita story, which frames the Selena story. 

This was beautifully written - each section is satisfying and meaty, and the heroines (for even Selena is the heroine of her own story) are all, as much as possible, active participants in their own lives. But it's also kind of long, and there's a lot of unpleasant stuff that happens - even to the real life character, Charlotte Rose, like every time we go flashback, she's undergoing some new humiliation.  Seriously, TWO men whose families kidnap them to avoid them marrying her? That's impressive.

It's still a good book, but I definitely did not understand why anyone would even want to be at the French court, it sounds like a complete hellhole, full of drama and backstabbing and people who hate you and constantly trying to stay on the good side of a terrible king. I've read another (fiction) book that revolved around the witchcraft and sorcery scandal and purge of King Louis' court - The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle. The tone of that felt kind of the same, and I was kind of like, why would anyone subject themselves to that?  Was non-court life so much worse?  I do think that some of the lengthy Charlotte-Rose parts could have been excised without much impact though, since it's a lot of humiliations and degradations one after the other, and more time spent on the things she enjoyed - the salon, and frankly, we don't even get to meet her husband.  That might have made it feel a little less unbalanced.  I also didn't get the sense that Charlotte-Rose thought much of god except that (in her darker times) that he'd forgotten her, so some of the drama about converting to Catholicism felt low-stakes.  Overall, there are happy endings, three of them, just as a fairy tale should have, but it can get kind of depressing first. 

I still enjoyed this, and thought it was a very well written, interesting book about a real person and a well-done integration of fantasy into history; and I'm already putting another of her books on my to-be-read list: a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

And speaking of which, I saw Miracle of the White Stallions, and it was perfect - cheesy, with a distracting American accent for the hero, and German accents for everyone else, particularly the villains, and plenty of shot of horse dancing.  Two thumbs up!


 22: A book with a title that contains "salty," "sweet," "bitter," or "spicy"
1.08